“I am giving a cocktail for a few people, Alessandro, Sozzani, Kontova, Prada (which also gave me a 30% discount!) etc. Much fun: I wishyou were here. I will send you pictures. Love. Miltos”

r.Neen, as we might call Miltos Manetas for the word he famously had coined by Lexico Branding, has put his virtual finger in the digital socket with this book of e-mails selected from his hard drive by his assistant and presented here. He’s the radical outsider who is shifting the center of attention from the official cultural bull’s eye to the artistic periphery, namely Mr. Neen himself. But for all the exciting digital progress, he’s really doing it the old-fashioned way: by making us think hard about who we are and what we’re all about. Is it the contradictions in Manetas’s work that fascinate? Is he a kind of digital Yves Klein? A Chris Burden for the Apple crowd? Or a Greek Andy Warhol? His pseudo-philosophical nomenclatures (like Telic and Neen) seem like amusing fig leaves for chaotic appreciation andartistic vision. But maybe they are more serious than they appear at first. At least this is not an artist who is going to paint himself into a corner, because in Neenville there is no more paint and there are no corners. And while we’re in Neenville, let’s not forget the simple pleasure of being voyeurs, of overhearing certain exchanges with the likes of Vanessa Beecroft or Rafaël Rozendaal. And what about those few places where the artist himself has obliterated text, scratching it out with a pencil? Intriguing…RD (Paris)

Miltos Manetas
Selected emails
Published September 2003

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